Chanukah on Christmas Avenue: Raising a Jewish family in Winterhaven. If you don’t live in Tucson, you don’t know Winterhaven. This is a smallish neighborhood—in the middle of the Tucson desert—that looks like Iowa. It sports quiet streets, culs de sac, trees, grass, and crazy electric bills every Christmas season. For two weeks each year, the place shuts down the streets and allows walk-through traffic, horse carriage...

I don’t care how you vote (okay, I do, but not for the reasons you think) and I don’t get political on this blog, but I do get “family” on this blog. So. Please encourage your friends and family to vote today. Just not with their feelings. Encourage everyone to vote with their heads. Ignore the hype. Ignore the attack ads. Look at the documentation from the League of Women voters–they’re sane. If you know...

So here we are, nine years out from–for better or worse–the most exciting thing to have happened to me, ever. And I wanted to talk a bit this year about the “exciting” thing. The word exciting has come to take on a positive meaning. The original meaning of “excite” was slightly different. Let’s check with our friend, the Oxford English Dictionary. (ksat)  [a. Fr. exciter (= Pr. and Sp. excitar), ad. L....

First, yes. I did take my knitting with me, which was nice because we had a forty minute wait for the tour. Yesterday, as part of my summer staycation with the kids, we went to the Titan missile museum. After posting a pic on Facebook, I found out just how unnervingly close to home a bunch of these suckers were back in the early 80s, when we all knew how long we had until we were dead once the buttons started being pushed. However, only one of...

It’s hard to be in Arizona.It’s hard and embarrassing to be here a lot lately.But this?This crosses so many lines. I’m hoping this will turn out to be apocryphal…but Wonkette isn’t usually fringe-y about things like...

Warning: screed ahead. I confess up front that my husband has a soft spot for Sandra Bullock. And I also confess that I hoped, once, that I had a little of her (dare I say it) “spunk” that was charmingly on display lo’ those many years ago in Speed. So, that’s all out there, now. Where I’m going with this is that even if you didn’t have a nice thing to say about the woman (or even though I do), the video...